Almost Was Good Enough
by Quillslinger
Summary: Seven years ago, Uchiha Shisui left home in search of something better. Little did he know that one day, his old life would catch up with him in the most unexpected way. ItaShi. AU.
1. Chapter 1

Being under house arrest at the behest of Hurricane Irene actually had some positive effects. I hope to finish this one soon, it's yet another oneshot that grew seriously out of hand.

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><p><strong>Almost Was Good Enough<strong>

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**Part I**

**. . .**

The late summer heat was battering Tokyo into submission, and the city was ready to cry uncle. Roppongi Hills was a shimmering mirage of technicolor glass paneling and the vicious glare reflecting off of Mori Tower alone made Shisui wonder if he would soon be requiring a full head CT. He slammed his car door and broke into a mad jog to get off the burning concrete, stumbled gratefully into the temperately controlled air of the Hydra office suite all the while lamenting the fact that he hadn't had enough coffee to think beyond elevator buttons.

It was Saturday morning and technically he wasn't even supposed to be here, but the last time Shisui hadn't gone to work on a Saturday he had been nineteen and had an eyebrow piercing and not been the cockiest fast-tracker of anybody's fancy advertising agency. When he had clambered out of bed at an ungodly hour this morning to assault the alarm, his bedmate hadn't even bothered rolling over to complain. This was a sign they were getting into that dangerously comfortable stage and that Shisui needed to end it. It was kind of a shame—Yuichi had nice hair and knew his way around a French press and physically speaking was a pretty close match, but there were only so many levels Shisui could take a not-relationship before it became absolutely necessary for him to get out of dodge.

He stepped through the sliding doors and beamed at the familiar faces that greeted him, the few, the proud, the psychotic weekenders. The atmosphere in the office was sunny and mellow, dark jeans and untucked dress shirts, even a pair of Converse sneakers strolling about, but any illusions he might have fostered about having an easy morning shattered when he saw the firm's chief creative officer—his ad hoc supervisor—striding into his office with a stormier than usual expression on his perpetually frowny face.

"Terumi-san wants a word with you."

Shisui immediately choked back a surge of kneejerk panic. "She's not _here_, is she?"

It was a silly question, and he wasn't surprised that Ao rolled his eyes. The last time the CEO of Hydra Group had done overtime was probably back in the heydays of the bubble economy; in these troubled times there were pedicures and luncheons and egg-harvesting appointment to occupy her invaluable weekends.

"It's about that thing with the Honda people tonight," Ao said. "Apparently, her date canceled –" Shisui winced, and braced for the inevitable. "– so you'll be accompanying her instead. Something about needing someone who looks pretty in a tuxedo and fetches a fine martini."

"Why does it have to be me?" Shisui protested. "She's got a personal assistant, doesn't she? That fluffy-haired kid with the glasses? Tell her to ruin his life instead. I'm a creative director—I have creativity flows to direct."

He waved in the general direction of his desk, which he could swear had more stuff on it than when he had left the office the previous evening, meaning either that he was finally succumbing to that overdue nervous breakdown or that his documents had developed the ability to breed.

"_Junior_ creative director," Ao corrected. "There are kids your age building rocket ships. Don't get cocky."

Shisui suspected if Ao ever met those precocious rocket scientists, he would give them the same amount of crotchety crap he doled out to him on a daily basis. "Why don't _you_ go with her?" he challenged, and the older man made a noise that sounded suspiciously like he was choking. His ears adopted a strangely rosy tint.

Ao looked right; Shisui looked left. They nearly collided into each other dashing for the door, and as Shisui fled into the common area, he nearly slammed into his own assistant.

"Slow down there, hot stuff," Akemi said coolly, handing him a lidded paper cup. As always she looked pristine and unruffled, a trait for which Shisui hated and judged her silently. "You're making the coffee nervous. What's the rush?"

"What are you even doing here?" Shisui said, but took a grateful sip. This beatific sentiment vanished when Akemi said, "I was just leaving," and shoved a tottering stack of alphabetized folders into his arms. The mystery of his self-aggregating workload was suddenly explained. "Unlike _some_ people, I have a life outside the office."

Shisui grimaced. "I so wish I could fire you right now."

Akemi just gave him a dulcet smile. "So what was the CCO hounding you about so early in the morning?"

"The usual tragedies," Shisui sighed. "His hair succumbing to male pattern baldness, his burning love for the boss yielding poor fruit, his midlife crisis looming on the horizon… Sad, sad stuff. Mei really should put the man out of his misery, but I think she's enjoying it too much."

"I hear Terumi-san watches a lot of Mad Men," Akemi conspired.

Shisui figured this was likely true, since there were days he too was deeply convinced his boss was the female version of Don Draper, but she also paid him a cool twenty million a year to flatten the world with his revolutionary campaigns, not to stand around the water cooler discussing American cable television like some bored housewife. "In any case," he said, pushing aside a molehill of unopened DHL packages to make room for the new folders, "she'll have to find someone else to put through the wringer tonight, because _I_ have a date."

"You don't date," Akemi said, wrinkling her pretty nose. "You made me draft a memo about it to pass around the office. It's like a policy."

"I'm completely serious," Shisui said grandly. "Tonight, I'm having dinner with one of the most beautiful women in Japan."

-x-

He was completely lying, of course. Aunt Mikoto was not his "date". Strictly speaking, she was not even Shisui's real aunt. She was the wife of his mother's older brother, and this was the first time they would be meeting face to face in more than seven years.

He pondered this fact and all the implications wherewithal all the way to the restaurant, some glitzy celebrity-endorsed affair that had just opened its doors and not yet made it into all the hippest lifestyle magazines. He had chosen it specifically to minimize the chance of running into somebody he knew who was liable to slap him in the face and spew comments like, "You're a piece of shit and I hope you rot in hell." It was a completely lost cause at this point, but he still hadn't broken himself of the habit of bending over backward for Mikoto's approval.

It was an October day sixteen years ago when Shisui had kissed his still-dozing mother goodbye and left for school and come home an orphan. When he returned to their tiny flat it was to stern policemen and buzzing neighbors and snatches of foreign-sounding words like "overdose" and "possession charges". After the police had taken his confused and hysterical statement, he had spent three nightmarish days in the custody of the disgruntled landlady, who was more concerned about the two months of rent Shisui's mother still owed her than whether or not his family could be tracked down. She was considerably happier when, on the third day, a well-dressed woman appeared on her doorstep asking for her nephew.

Mikoto, it transpired, had left her one-year-old in the care of the nanny and booked a ticket for Osaka immediately after receiving the call. To Shisui, she was an alien Madonna-like presence, an intruder into the life he was still desperately clinging to, but that first night when he curled up like a shrimp in his queen-sized hotel bed and couldn't seem to stop crying long enough to lose consciousness, she ran her long tapered fingers through his matted hair and sang him a whispering song, and as much as he wanted to keep her at a remote planetary distance, he knew now he'd never stood a chance.

"Listen, Shisui-kun," Mikoto said softly. "When I was twelve, my father and I were caught in an accident. We were driving home from a New Year party when another car swiped into ours, and we went off the road. My father died on impact."

It would be years before he learned the greater and more truthful details of these events. When the other car had t-boned theirs, part of the car door had actually broken loose and embedded itself in her father's chest, and Mikoto had watched, trapped by the seatbelt, as he had bled out in the gathering snow. She had sat in the freezing car with him for four hours before help had arrived, and had a long, jagged scar along the side of her neck where a shard of windshield glass had sliced her flesh millimeters away from her carotid artery.

Shisui raised his smudged face from the damp pillow. "D'ya miss him?"

"Every day," she told him then. "But it gets better, I promise."

Arriving at the restaurant, Shisui stopped at the entrance and touched the collar of his shirt in a slightly self-conscious way, feeling all of eight years old again. His keys jingled in his pocket as he walked through the door, and all he could think about was how seven years ago he had snuck out of Mikoto's house in the middle of the night and boarded a train out of town without a single word of thanks or goodbye.

-x-

Beyond the requisite greetings, neither of them could really think of how to begin the conversation, and instead spent a disproportionate amount of time pleating their napkins into perfect triangles. Not exactly cold, but wary, as expected of estranged relatives. Finally, Shisui downed his aperitif in a practiced movement that had the servers looking at him askance, and cleared his throat before saying, "Is the family well?"

For some reason being in her company gave him the urge to break out in Kansai-ben; the coarse, melodic sounds were still there, lying dormant underneath years of posh standard dialect wearing on his voice box.

Presently, Mikoto put down her glass of sherry. She looked older, but still elegant and streamlined, a lady in tasteful black. A faint smile flashed across her face, vanishing completely when she threaded her mouth into a tense line and said, "Grandmother has passed away."

Shisui dry-swallowed, but kept his expression even.

"It was Alzheimer's," Mikoto continued. "She was diagnosed four years ago."

"Oh," Shisui said. "That's… fast." Much too fast, from what he knew of the disease, which was admittedly little.

Mikoto nodded delicately. "I know it's a lot to take in at once.

"No, Mikoto-san," Shisui insisted, waving his hand for emphasis. "I'm fine, really. Do you want me at the funeral? Is that why you've come up?"

At this, she looked slightly uncomfortable. "We held the wake last week, the funeral the day after. I'm sorry we didn't inform you earlier but it was her wishes."

That surprised him not at all. "I understand."

In the ambient light of the citronella candles, he could see Mikoto's throat working, a strained motion. A knot of horror twisted in his chest. He would never not know it, the expression that showed her emotions so close to the surface, the fraught and sincere affection she had for him. That this had happened—her again having to be the person coming after him—was a source of shame for Shisui, reminder that he was no more than a chasm in the hills and valleys of her life.

"We looked for you," she said finally, in a weak, tinny voice. "We really did."

Shisui cut his gaze away, and remembered that another reason he had chosen this restaurant was because it was French and ensured him an arsenal of utensils to nervously fiddle with. "It wasn't your fault," he said, fingering the salad fork. "I didn't want to be found."

"I had a feeling that might have been the case," Mikoto said. "But we looked anyway, and we did eventually succeed."

Shisui stopped picking at his appetizer and looked up in surprise. "You did?"

"When you were taking your university entrance exams, you contacted Masafumi-sensei for your high school records. He was the one who told us that you were in Tokyo."

"Oh. Right."

"Grandmother made us take a vow," she explained, speaking slowly and deliberately. "This was just around the time when we found out that she was sick and she—she had us make a vow that we wouldn't try to contact you until after she was gone."

_It figures_, he thought, and clamped his jaw just in time to stop himself from saying it. A side benefit of being on constant image-control duty: knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

"Toward the end, there was a brief period when she became lucid again," Mikoto said. "That was when she told us to make sure that you are present for the reading of the will."

And that was all there was to it.

They made determinedly airy chatter from that point on, and dinner ended soon afterward. Shisui shouted down Mikoto's protest and drove her back to her hotel. Traffic had dwindled by the time he was making his way back across town so he allowed himself a little recklessness, took a few turns faster than they liked it in driving school, relishing the way the Bentley handled under his hands. Pulling up at a red light, he stared at his knuckles taut against the steering wheel, his perfect two-ten-grip. The will, huh? Strictly business, but it necessitated going back. _Going home_.

Damn.

-x-

On the flight back to Nagoya all those years ago, Mikoto had explained to Shisui that it was his grandmother who had ordered her to go fetch him from Osaka. This was the first time in his life that Shisui learned his mother's mother was still alive. He was also just now coming to realize that it wouldn't just be him and his aunt living together—other people would have to be there too.

"What's grandma like?" Shisui asked, poking at his soggy fruit salad.

Mikoto was quiet for a moment. "Grandmother is… traditional." She gave him a reassuring smile. "But that's not all. You'll get to meet your uncle and cousins as well. We have two boys—my oldest is only two years younger than you. I hope you two will get along, Shisui-kun."

For some reason, her expression floundered a little around that last remark, so Shisui had to wonder if Mikoto's older son was some kind of obnoxious demon child. That would be the perfect cherry to top this cake of fear and dread.

"Konoha is a very small town," his aunt went on in the same uncertain tone, seeming to have lost her ease. "Nothing like Osaka, so it may take some getting used to, but we're only a hop and a skip from Nagoya proper. I'm sure that you will be very happy there."

Shisui mumbled an unintelligible assent, and forked a limp slice of honeydew into his mouth, staring out the window at the snowy blanket of clouds. He was all kinds of adjectives at the moment, but 'happy' wasn't one of them.

It didn't help his nerves any to see the house, a sprawling two-storied monstrosity, preponderant and shadowed, the kind of grand but fading pre-war mansion built by men whose family history spanned the vista of years. At the moment, however, the castle was without a presiding lord—the only son and heir apparent was a city councilman who was seldom home. For many years now, Uchiha household had been run by women—specifically, one woman, the sixty-year-old matriarch Uchiha Shizuka. She was the galactic center of their little globular cluster, the core around which they existed as satellites, bound tight as a tick.

An older couple met them at the door, and obviously Shisui had never had a _servant_ but he knew one when he saw one. The man immediately swooped in for the luggage and wordlessly disappeared into the house. He hung back, shuffling his foot nervously while Mikoto held a whispered conversation with the woman, something about a baby and dinner preparation. After a moment, she turned and asked the lady to show Shisui to his room.

"Of course, m'am," the woman said haltingly. "It's just that… Shizuka-sama… she would like to see him. First thing, she said."

They exchanged a look. "I see," Mikoto said, and now her voice too had gone a little skewed. "Well, Shisui-kun, please follow Tomoe-san for now. I will see you later." Even her soft encouraging smile couldn't alleviate his growing apprehension, nor mask her own.

-x-

He was shuffled into a sitting room that, like every other part of the house he'd seen, was sleek, roomy, sparsely decorated but still ample with the galling evidence of _plenty_—embroidered sitting pillows, ikebana and jade ornaments on dark wood tables, a hanging scroll on the wall of the alcove. His grandmother sat at the center, limbs folded in strict seiza. The bleached sunlight filtered through the shoji doors struck one side of her face, presenting a severe dichotomy.

Shisui could only imagine how he must have appeared to her at that first meeting, a ratty coltish thing with knobby knees and elbows, brimming with cheek; an adenoidal-voiced nuisance.

Shizuka looked up at him blankly. "Well, sit down," she said, nodding at a cushion directly opposite from her. "And straighten up when you're being spoken to."

Shisui scowled. People who swept around being all disdainful at others always rubbed him up the wrong way. "I'm lookin' right at'cha, ain't I?"

His grandmother lifted a thin eyebrow unurgently. She picked up the teapot and filled a small cup before pushing it toward Shisui. He stared at the pale green liquid like it was poison.

"You took your mother's name in the family register," said Shizuka, sipping from her own cup.

Shisui nodded, somewhat dubiously. Who else's would he take?

"Kiyoko _would_ do that," his grandmother said. "Clever of her. She always tried so hard to disown this family, but clearly wasn't above making use of the advantages it provides."

It would take Shisui a long time to work it out, but the fact of the matter was the battle lines of this war had been drawn long before he ever arrived at this house. Uchiha Kiyoko had not always been as her son knew her. Separated from her older brother by a nearly a decade, she had been the baby of the brood, favorite of her father and a darling in the extended family. They had thought her wise beyond her years, when in reality she had been young beyond her youth, sly and charming and spoiled, and when she had run away and left it all behind—for _love_, of all things—her betrayal had never been forgiven. As if forgiveness could have redeemed her.

The scary thing—the scary thing was that Shisui could _see_ his mother in Shizuka. She had the same aquiline nose, tangled hair pushed away from her angular face in a roiling knot, dark wells of fatigue floating her sharp eyes. The other similarities were even worse. He'd loved his mother fiercely and irrationally, would have moved heaven and earth to have her back again, but even he had to admit that she had been anything but an easy person to be related to. She'd been far from a perfect mother, cried sometimes but mostly yelled and hit when frustrated, and she had been shrill and awful with people and made their lives more difficult than it needed to be. To witness all her worst qualities aged by three decades and cranked up to eleven was like a sick joke.

"And what's become of your father, child?"

"Dunno," Shisui muttered. "I never met 'im."

Shizuka's lips lifted in a scornful sneer, and suddenly the deep, plummy shadows under her almond eyes seemed cruel and grotesque, intent with malice. Shisui was momentarily glad, because even at her meanest that expression had never appeared on his mother's face.

"I should have expected as much," she said serenely. "Really, I don't know how I could have raised such a shameless whore."

Something in Shisui snapped.

Even though in the years to come he too would start to look back with less than reverent eyes, would trivialize, crack jokes and make blasphemous remarks—"My mama used to rub my back with alcohol when I was sick, unless she'd already drunk it all first."—it didn't change the fact that her absence stung like a spanking and the grief was still too raw and manifest for him to be sitting here listening to some supposed "family" cast aspersions on her character.

The tea cup flew with deadly accuracy. Shisui's mind held a precise flash of Shizuka's desiccated gray face wet and alight with shock, her absolute power for one instant diluted, and the next thing he knew Tomoe had him by the arm and was dragging him frantically down the endless corridor, up a narrow flight of stairs. A door slammed, and he was alone in the dark.

-x-

The room was in the servants' old quarters, two floors up, a former kitchen that had been transformed into a semi-storage unit with books stacked in the blackened stove and all manners of knickknacks piled in the sink. A single cot was wedged beneath the dormer window, the glass too grimy to look out from. Ten feet by ten feet, the room was the size of a prison cell and smelled of old charcoal, but Shisui didn't care. Fine by him. He could stay here forever. He would never come out again.

By nightfall however he was tired and cold and hungry and no longer feeling so brave. There was only a single naked bulb in the room, casting an oily yellow light, and the stripped dressmaker's dummy in the corner was beginning to look sinister. Shisui shuddered, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard a click in the lock. Momentarily, the door creaked open, and he saw through the gap two very grey eyes flicked with charcoal, peering at him incuriously.

A silent beat, and then the visitor stepped fully into the room, carrying a tray laden with bowls and chopsticks. Shisui scooted back a little on the bed, half-certain he was facing an apparition.

"Who're ya?"

"My name is Itachi," the boy answered, which clarified exactly nothing. "Mother asked me to bring you this, since you missed dinner." He placed the tray on an end table and stared at Shisui expectantly.

"Are ya Aunt Mikoto's older kid?" Shisui ventured.

Itachi nodded. For a six-year-old, he was a very small, very intense child, but at least now he seemed more solid, not quite as ghostly. Just another hitherto unknown kin.

"Are you going to eat?"

"Oh, yeah."

While Shisui practically inhaled the food, Itachi sat himself down on the cot and continued to watch him with that steady, flatly nonjudgmental gaze. He looked like someone who had been taught it was impolite to stare, but staunchly believed it was only a matter of the proper approach.

"When you've finished, I can show you to your room," he said after a moment, sounding at once practiced and impromptu. His was a masculine voice, husky, unsentimental, utterly direct. "You must be tired from your trip."

Shisui swallowed a mouthful of chicken hastily and said, "Ya mean this ain't my room?"

"No," Itachi said, and gave him a weird look. "This is the garret. You'll be sharing a room with me, in the east wing."

"We hafta share?" Shisui asked. "Why? This house is _huge_. This room is almost as big as my old apartment." A vague ache flared in him for a second, but he resolutely forced it down.

Itachi shrugged; he had no explanation, and felt no need to devise one. _Tough audience_, Shisui thought. For no reason, it made him grin. _Strange little dude_.

As they made their way downstairs—Shisui insisting on taking over tray-bearing duty—his cousin looked over his shoulder abruptly and said, "I don't know if anyone's told you, but you've been enrolled at my school. It's very close to the house. I always walk."

"Okay," Shisui said. "Y'gonna take me tomorrow?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Tomorrow is Sunday."

"What grade are ya in?"

"Second."

"But yer two years younger than me."

"That's true."

Shisui blinked in silence, transfixed by the consistency of this deadpan delivery. The food had taken warm residence inside him, driving his mind into a glowy, amniotic stupor.

"Well, I hope ya don't snore."

-x-

Itachi didn't snore, but he did get up at six am to do radio calisthenics, a fact which horrified Shisui to no end. After the squats and the sit-ups and the jumping jacks he was basically ready to throw himself out the window to escape.

In response to Shisui's reasonable complaints about sleep-deprivation, his cousin said, "But it's good for your health." His eyes narrowed. "Don't you do any morning exercise?"

"Not really," Shisui said. "Um, I play soccer after school sometimes."

He wasn't thrilled about having another encounter with his grandmother, but in immense relief discovered that she had left town to visit a friend. Instead, Shisui was introduced to his uncle in a meeting that left no impression whatsoever. Secretly, he was grateful not to find any traces of his mother in her older brother, who seemed more disposed to blandness and stoic silence.

After breakfast, Itachi attempted to interest Shisui in his _favorite thing in the whole wide world: _his little brother. This endeavor yielded limited success, though Shisui was quick to assure him that while Sasuke was simply overflowing with positive qualities, it was a personal taste thing and babies were just not – his – thing. He couldn't tell if Itachi was satisfied with this half-assed justification or not, and fled the foul-smelling nursery before he could find out.

Scouting about, Shisui found his favored spot, and set up camp by the miniature pond in the far corner of the garden, under the shade of a gnarled-ancient willow tree. Something about the still green water filled him with a cleansed, cathartic calm. He dozed off in the cool breeze at some indeterminate point, woke up to a ham sandwich in his face.

"Yer a little spooky, ya know that? Like a sticky thing that won't blow off."

Itachi rounded his shoulders in a sedate movement that was becoming familiar, acknowledging this accusation without deference. He brushed crumbs from his shirt, patiently waited for Shisui to initiate conversation. The remainder of the afternoon was devoted to discussing the fact that everyone in Shisui's newly discovered tribe was related to a scientifically worrying degree.

"Wow." Shisui expelled an awed breath. "We're so weird. Ya'd think one of us woulda been born with, like, _gills_ or something."

Itachi actually _checked, _slipping his spatulate fingers under Shisui's chin with a faintly consternated expression, blinking uncomprehendingly when Shisui protested that it tickled. "No gills there," he concluded, drawing his hand away.

It was as if he had already installed Shisui into his daily routine. An oddball, for sure, almost supernaturally quiet and wry, but Shisui had taken a shine to it immediately. He was easily drawn to quirks, fascinated by human puzzles.

-x-

He was glad to see Monday arrive, because it meant _school_. He'd done this before, changed schools at the drop of a hat and had taken to each upheaval like a fish in new-but-acceptable water. Besides which, he _liked_ school, if for no reason other than that he was good at it. He'd always done his homework by himself and netted pretty decent grades. School was familiar territory; he'd conquered it before and would do so again effortlessly.

After suffering through the principal's corny speech about how each of them was a Little Leaf with a Will of Fire and zzzzz, everyone had fallen asleep ten minutes ago, Shisui was finally introduced to class 3-E. His new classmates were curious about Osaka. Most of them had never been outside the village. They also thought he talked funny, but he gladly went along with it and played up the quaint golly-gee bromides for all they were worth. Just little things, no biggie.

Then it was lunch time, and apparently their little hick town school didn't do set lunches so the children brought their own bento. This was awesome except for the part where nobody had bothered informing Shisui about it, but it was fine anyway since he could make do with Fumi-chan's omelette and Kyoko-chan's fried chicken and Nagisa-chan's curry bread. He was about to go halfsies with Keita-kun on an onigiri when he felt a light tap on his shoulder.

"Here," Itachi said, this time holding out a bento wrapped in a navy blue furoshiki.

"Did yer mama give you this job?" Shisui asked, grinning. "Bringin' me food?"

"You should bring it yourself, starting tomorrow."

"No problem. Hey, wanna join us?"

Something flickered through Itachi's eyes. He glanced over Shisui's shoulder, to where his classmates were gathered, staring at them in ordinary curiosity. Shisui had thought him unflappable, but all of a sudden and for no apparent reason he seemed to have been thoroughly flapped. Lapsed silent, he crossed the schoolyard in a hurried, staccato gait. And Shisui, gripping his lunchbox and gawking like an idiot, only nascently coming to comprehend the tenderness this boy could bring forth in him. What he had taken for droll, placid cheer might actually be the subdued behavior of one who had never been properly socialized. It should come as no surprise. He had after all (Shisui thought with distaste) grown up under Grandmother's noxious influence.

When they got home Shizuka was back and had "company" over. For reasons indiscernible to the sane, she wanted Shisui to attend tea with them, and it took no time at all for her to show her bitch colors and him to run his mouth off and cause another scene. Predictably he got sent to the garret again, where hours later Itachi fulfilled his duty and brought Shisui his dinner.

-x-

"Shisui. Wake up."

He shook his head, groggy. His skin was clammy and cold, and just felt so _wrong_. A shadow like death stood mutely at his bedside.

"You were yelling in your sleep."

Just Itachi, then.

"Wha'? I was?"

Itachi gave a tiny nod. Shisui uncurled from his usual prawn impression and rubbed at his eyes tiredly. His cheeks felt alarmingly wet. Above him, the fan loomed like a giant starfish glommed ominously to the ceiling.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Itachi tuck his elbows into his sides, hugging his fine-ribbed chest over his t-shirt. His breathing slowed, like he was trying to work out a problem. He inhaled, as if to speak, then resolutely closed his mouth and flattened his palm over Shisui's eyes.

"What're ya doin'?"

"Mother told me you were having a hard time and that I should try my best to help you adjust," Itachi said matter-of-factly. "Is this helping?"

Actually, it weirded him the hell out, but after the initial startle of resistance, he relaxed easily enough. Something about the human palm, that smooth waxy surface, was so perfectly suited for calming a fevered brow. _You can't bandage a palm_, his mother had once said, after getting a shard of broken glass embedded in hers. _The skin won't allow it_. _It's a freaky callus left over from the apes. _It occurred to him she might have been the worse for drink, but the memory seemed to have gained a dimension of humor post-loss. Stubborn, fickle, apish skin. He wasn't one for grief-stricken prostrations. His mother was dead and he was eight, absolutely entitled to succumb, but he wouldn't. No matter what happened, he would live.

"Uh," Shisui said. "Yah. Little bit. Thanks." He shifted awkwardly. "Ya don't hafta stand there. I'm okay now, go back to yer bed."

"I'm fine right here."

"Then lie down a'least," he slurred, already drowsy. "I'll be asleep lickety-split."

For the second time that day, there was that flicker of hesitance. This time, however, Itachi complied with his suggestion—possibly because it was framed like a request. He felt a weight on his foot, then his calf. Itachi's hair was soft and hot and his hand balled beside his cheek smelled like baby shampoo; after finishing homework, he had spent the evening playing with his brother.

"…this is a very small bed."

"Mm'kay," Shisui mumbled, drifting off. For the first time in days, when he closed his eyes and felt longing deep to the marrow of his bones, it wasn't for the past.

. . .

**TBC**


	2. Chapter 2

**Almost Was Good Enough**

**. . .  
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**Part II**

**. . .**

Shisui had meant to spend the remainder of the weekend mulling over his options. On Monday morning he still hadn't come to a decision, and resignedly slouched into work where four separate people scurried up to inform him that Mei was in a _terrible_ mood, that she couldn't _believe_ the stunt he had pulled the other night, that she couldn't _believe _he had had the audacity to defy her direct order, and did he know Ao had worn a _tailcoat_ to the reception? Mei _also_ didn't believe the horse crap he'd tried to feed her about having to man a friend's suicide watch, but the slightly guilty look on Akemi's face when she brought in his morning coffee told Shisui that the feebleness of his excuse was not all to blame.

In a moment of weakness he let slip the details of his latest drama, and despite the cut-throat sums he paid her to be helpful, she proved her uselessness by saying, "It's just a family visit, how bad can it be?"

"I don't see _you_ going over the moon about going home whenever a holiday rolls around."

"That's because I grew up on a _pig farm_. I looked up your hometown and it's what, five miles outside of Nagoya?" she said, rolling her eyes. "It's no Tokyo, but it's not exactly the sticks. You always make it sound like you lived all the way out in the boondocks or something."

"I might as well have," Shisui said darkly. "Don't you know about the creepy insular shit that goes on in those 'traditional' communities? So you leave, hoping it'll be easy to just burn your bridges and never look back—and for awhile you get so wrapped up in dealing with your new bullshit that you delude yourself into thinking that it _is_ easy, until something like this comes along and it all comes barreling like an acid flashback."

"Okay, you totally just lost me there," Akemi said. She planted her elbow on the reception counter and propped her chin on her hand, eyes glittering. "So, you need a date to the funeral, country boy? Because I hear Dr. Fujimiya down in IT is very, _very_ interested."

"Does everybody here have to all up in everybody else's business all the time?"

"Well, now that you're _dating_ again and all..."

"It's not the actual funeral," he admitted. "Just the reading of the will, and I'm not sure I'm going to go."

"Why not?" Akemi asked. "What's the big deal?"

"Were you not listening during the part about leaving and never looking back?"

"No," she said, and walked away, because they didn't raise you right on those pig farms.

This appalling mess couldn't have come at a worse time. Hydra was well into Q2 and had an influx of new clients on their hands on top of all their standing accounts, and usually this time of year Shisui didn't even have the luxury of _sleeping_, let alone taking extended vacations to deal with family ridiculousness. He stared sadly at his computer screen, the fucking gorgeous art proof slides he had drawn up, then made a decision and stomped back out into the open office.

"Sugimoto!"

His criminally inept project manager leapt up from his desk where he had been doing something that looked suspiciously like reading erotic fanfiction, looking at Shisui wildly.

"I have to be out of town for a couple of days, so I'm putting you in charge of the Comme des Garçons account, effective now."

"You're serious about this?" Sugimoto stuttered.

"This account is my precious baby," Shisui said bitterly. "Against my better judgment, I'm placing her into your clumsy hands which I strongly doubt you generally put to better use than waving your dick around. I will take you out to dinner, suck you off over dessert, and buy you a pretty, pretty pony when I get back, so do not—_do not_ fuck this up."

"Really?" Sugimoto said hopefully, and Shisui threw up his hands and left in disgust.

-x-

He loitered outside Mei's office for a full ten minutes before hating himself enough to go inside. The thing was Mei didn't have an office so much as a traditional tea room somehow squeezed into a downtown Tokyo penthouse. She owned no desk or computer or anything vaguely businesslike, and most of the time could be found lounging at the edge of the miniature waterfall playing with one of the many, many orchid arrangements she had strewn about the room.

There were only three kinds of women who succeeded in the corporate world: the Workaholic, the Guy, and the Hostess. Terumi Mei was the third, and exemplified the trope. It was a trait Shisui grudgingly admired—he operated in much the same way, via the principle of working with what you had instead of whining about it. The two of them had a disturbing amount in common, including and not limited to the fact that Mei had started out in her previous firm at the position Shisui currently held. This was probably why she picked on him so much.

Mei lifted her eyes slowly when he came in. "You broke my heart the other night, you know?"

Shisui smirked. "I'm sure that with time and a tasteful musical montage you will get over it and be a strong, confident woman once more." She was a pathological flirt, increasingly so as her age inched ever closer to the Big Four-O. Generally Shisui wholeheartedly approved of this tendency, except for that one time they had both hooked up with the same print ad model in the same weekend and hadn't been able to meet each other's eyes in the office for days.

"I know this is going to sound crazy." Hopefully not so crazy she fired him on the spot on charges of being insanely unqualified for his job. "And this is possibly the worst time ever to ask, but I'm going to have to make use of some of my… vacation days."

"Are you sure?" Mei said, eyes huge. "You went to work with a 41C fever last spring. Akemi tells me sometimes you forget national holidays and call her asking why she isn't at work."

"It's family business," he said, and added, "_Serious_ business. No, believe me, I'd get out of it if I could."

The bald desperation in his voice must have given her pause. She tented her fingers thoughtfully and said, "I don't know. I need someone around to wrangle the squeaky-voiced geeks down in IT, lest they start getting uppity."

"I hate the squeaky-voiced geeks down in IT," Shisui said. "Make Ao deal with them, he likes that whole putting people down shtick."

"But you're the only one they listen to," Mei said with a mean, mean smile. "They always get super duper excited whenever you descend into their fortress of solitude. I think they all want in your pants."

Shisui lifted his shoulders in resignation. "I do tend to attract those types," he said, and felt depressed that he was only half-joking.

His history with Mei was yet another tale straight out of a television drama. Seven years ago when he had arrived in Tokyo alone and empty-handed, hungry for a piece of the world bigger than what he'd known, Shisui had fallen in with an indie startup crew. It was just him and three other guys, equally insane but brilliant innovator-types, and really, were there any other kinds? Along with innovating stuff they also pioneered the ambitious field of ramen-based, couch-surfing subsistence living, and for one spectacularly awful winter month basically lived in their unheated barely furnished office. Through a combination of sheer tenacity and some truly impressive shystering they somehow managed to land an account with Japan Airlines. When their campaign began garnering national attention, Hoshiteru Inc. stepped in.

It had been Mei's idea to rebrand the merged firm, changed the name to Hydra. It sounded pure as spring water but actually meant a multi-headed venomous snake of antiquity, which Shisui conceded was a nice touch. His colleagues—_the whores_—were all chuffed to bits about being absorbed into the new agency and the chance to work a bigger market on a fatter paycheck, but Shisui resisted. _He_ would not betray the independent visionary spirit. _He_ would do something worthwhile with his life, starting by pocketing his cut and toddling off to Tokyo Motherfucking University to get a proper education.

Exactly forty-five minutes into his first economics lecture, he realized what a moronic hipster he was being. He pulled a million all-nighters and cut his lifespan short by several years just to bulldoze through the two and a half it took to complete his bullshit degree before crawling back to admit that he had been wrong, wrong, wrong. Thankfully Mei was in a merciful mood that day and only made him grovel for all of half a humiliating day before giving him a job.

Since then another three years had blown by, and even though Shisui knew he'd sold out big time it wasn't as if he'd ever wanted to take any of it back. There were years and miles aplenty separating the person he was now and the kid who'd stumbled into this city miserable and pissed-off, hell-bent on carving out a new life for himself. But even if you could take the boy out of the past, you couldn't take the past out of the boy.

"It was my grandmother's dying wish," he said in the end, with all the solemnity he could manage without making himself ill.

Mei tilted her head, her shiny fire engine hair sliding over one shoulder. "Well, if it's like _that_."

"Yeah, it's like that," Shisui said, though the very words pained him. "I'm going to need a few days off work."

His boss wiggled her perfectly manicured fingers in an abstract movement, said, "Take as many as you like." He had the distinct feeling this entire exercise was more about Mei reestablishing her pecking order and mantle of authority than anything to do with his traveling arrangements.

-x-

From Tokyo to Nagoya it was about two hours on the bullet train, but Shisui chose the six-hour drive instead, taking his car out for her maiden road trip. The heat wave from the previous week had finally let up, and as the day retreated into late afternoon, the summer sky melted into deep coral, a bruised purple line faint at the horizon. Familiar landmarks were beginning to emerge on both sides of the highway, something like nostalgia bobbing to the surface of his mind.

In the early 90's, bolstered with confidence inspired by the economic bubble, the Aichi branch of the National Tourism Organization had undertaken a number of ambitious construction projects in and around the city of Nagoya. In one especially egregious instance, they dumped tens of millions into erecting an "authentic" Dutch windmill on the bank of the Hori River. It was a direct rip-off of the De Liefde ground-sailer in Chiba, and lay just within the boundary of Konoha Village. This attraction never yielded the margin of profit the government had expected, and after the stock market crash, the mill was pretty much abandoned, in the following decade serving as nothing more than a picaresque reminder of fiscal incompetence.

To Shisui, however, the sight of its stationary wings stenciled against a honeyed sunset stirred only memories of lazy autumn days and a girl named Hyuuga Hinata.

-x-

Shisui, when asked, often told people that he'd first become gainfully employed at the age of thirteen. This was only partially true, as he had already spent a year before that hawking snacks and drinks at the village train station like the most destitute of street urchins. This story could be a hilarious icebreaker except whenever he began comparing himself to a young Thomas Edison someone would inevitably point out that Edison had been an asshole and then ruefully shake their head like this just explained so much.

It was good while it lasted, but right around the time several street vendors got into a bidding war over his services, his grandmother found out and put an end to his days as The Littlest Entrepreneur. She wouldn't give him a reason, but he assumed it was because it _besmirched the family name_ to have one of their progenies, well, hawking snacks and drinks at the village train station like the most destitute of street urchins.

"Is it money that you want?" she randomly asked one day when he was scrubbing the walkway under her supervision and dreaming about spilling pine-scented floor cleaner on her kimono.

"And that's bad?" Shisui muttered. In five years she had never so much as offered him pocket change, but apparently resourcefulness was a human trait disallowed in Shizuka's relatives.

She appeared not to hear him. "Just as well. Maybe now you can focus your energy on the tasks you're given at _home_."

Shisui frowned. "I slave around for ya and yer ol' biddies all the time." One of her favorite hobbies was trying to break him of his Osaka dialect, so naturally he exaggerated it as much as humanly possible. "Didcha forget just 'cos we haven't had any smashed teacups lately?"

"Are you implying that compensation will improve the quality of your lackluster performance?

"Wha'? Ya gonna _pay_ me to spend time with ya?"

"If that's what's needed to incentivize you, I suppose I don't have a choice."

"Nobody asked ya to do that," he retorted, wringing the damp washcloth in his hand.

Shizuka rose to her full height, towering over him. "I just don't want you to feel like you've been relying on someone's charity," she said. "That's what all this nonsense is about, isn't it?"

Shisui glared, but kept his mouth shut. After five years, he had learned to hate her in silence, hate with a straight face. He put up with the snide remarks, the Sisyphean chores she enjoyed setting, mainly because he perceived them as challenges, but on this he wouldn't budge.

At the time, Itachi was smack dab in the middle of another starstruck phase where he was plumbly and consistently wowed by his little brother. Sasuke was six years old, and even though Shisui had liked Itachi just fine at that age, no force on Earth could move him to feel the same about anyone else. When he'd tried to stage an intervention, however, Itachi had somehow arrived at the appalling conclusion that Shisui was _jealous_. "It's not a competition," he'd said tolerantly, and Shisui had snorted with laughter. Only someone who had never had to compete would ever make such a declaration.

Still, he listened to Shisui's grievances with the usual serenity, and then handed him a box of strawberry Pocky before tearing off a page from his English notebook and writing down the number for his former homeroom teacher. Kurenai-sensei listened to his tale with slightly more bafflement, but referred him anyway, which was when Shisui discovered that he was to be a tutor.

-x-

Hinata's father was very specific and adamant in his instructions. She needed help with her math, her grades were dismal, she was hopeless, hopeless, hopeless, and he should start with the basics but drive her as hard as possible because otherwise she just wouldn't learn. The fact that he said all this with his daughter in the same room made Shisui's nostrils flare in secondhand indignation. He reined it in, but it was very hard.

He did as he was told, but quickly made an odd discovery.

"Okay, either your pop's been lyin' to me or yer seriously hidin' somethin', missy. Fess up."

"W-what do you mean?" she asked, eyes trained on the hands folded in her lap.

"Yer not actually bad at math, are ya?" he said knowingly. She looked confused.

He had started out with basic problems, then slipped in a few harder ones when she breezed through those, and kept upping the difficulty without telling her until it became apparent that, as far as improving aptitude was concerned, he had no business being there.

"I'm not good at taking tests," she admitted, blushing hard enough to stall traffic. Maybe it was nerves, or something else equally nebulous, neither of which could be resolved by repeatedly hammering her brain into mincemeat for three hours a day.

So every day, at the hour-and-a-half mark, Shisui would snap the book shut and announce, "Let's go see the windmill."

The thing with Hinata officially began because he liked the way she sat in chairs. Tiny and birdlike, she folded herself up like a canary on the perch of its cage, knees up against her chest and arms hugging her legs like a precise fragile instrument just barely holding itself together. It made his heart lurch protectively, made him want to step in and take over the task for her. A risky impulse. She only sat like that when they were alone together. Whenever someone else entered the room, an abrupt change would come over her pale timid eyes and she would snap back into a ramrod position, like a Pavlovian reflex. Her father's presence in particular produced the most startling effect, and Shisui didn't need the one Psych course he would later take and hate in college to figure out the atmosphere in the Hyuuga household.

Part of it was because it was all so similar. There was apparently a new baby in the family, and on top of the regular chaos Shisui associated with memories of Sasuke's bean-sized days, it transpired that Hinata's mother was ailing in health, which explained why Shisui had never seen hide nor hair her in all his time tutoring Hinata: she was staying at a hospital in the city.

"Father is sad," Hinata told him on their first outing. They were on his bike, her face pressed softly to his body, and he could feel her breath warm on the small of his back where her mouth could just reach. "He doesn't smile like he used to, and sometimes he cries when he sees Hanabi."

Shisui murmured bland agreement, and quietly revised his opinion of Hyuuga Hiashi, but not by an awful lot. He wasn't old enough to be _that _charitable toward adults. He revised the rule about six-year-olds as well, this time much more generously.

Then there was the boy who stalked about the house. A cousin. He was hard-eyed and rawboned and always seemed to idle in doorways, standing crooked as if hung on a hook, lingering in those transitional spaces like someone intent on leading a liminal existence. Shisui knew nothing about Neji, only that Hinata sometimes stared after his squared retreating back, damp-eyed and wordless. There was deep water here, some kind of family tragedy, and he recognized the cousin's chosen response for what it was: anger. It was a very specific anger, not yet mellowed out and with nowhere to go. It was a dangerous situation, a gunpowder keg placed precariously close to a spitting hearth, one that would have consumed Shisui himself had it not been for a certain imp following him around stuffing food in his mouth to fill up the emptiness.

On the gentled slope of the Hori, they made windmill arms, or skipped rocks, or sometimes just sat and watched the defunct mill on the opposite bank, and Shisui told the stories of Shizuka's cartoonish evils. In small doses, the frustration popped open easily, then suctioned itself shut.

"Troubled home life, ya know? I'm the bad seed. Maybe someday I'll run away." He flicked her nose. "Will'cha let me take ya away?" Clapped his hands together to make her smile glimmer.

And sometimes Itachi would walk by on his way back from picking Sasuke up from cello lessons and the two of them would join him on the grass as twilight slowly wrapped the shadow around the bright day like a cool fist. Looking back he always felt certain he could have been happy living that way forever, but hindsight was 20/20. Life only made sense in retread.

-x-

The drive into the village proper felt like pins and needles. Shisui tried not to feel paranoid about every longhaired silhouette that crossed his vision, and nearly succumbed to four separate freak-outs before reaching the house, but all his pain and turmoil turned out to be for naught because when he arrived, Itachi wasn't home.

He was at Meidai, finishing his first year of a doctorate program in Environmental Engineering. Shisui faked cheeriness upon being assured that he still lived at home and would be returning shortly. As far as anyone alive was aware, they had been the best of buddies right up till the moment Shisui had made a break for it, so he wasn't surprised. Not for the first time in his life he found a dreaded meeting intercepted by a conversation with Fugaku.

Their relationship had been and was still defined by the complete lack thereof. It almost seemed as if his uncle had forgotten that he'd ever had a nephew named Shisui, let alone one that had lived in his house for almost a decade. After the civil interrogation, during which Shisui's not-inconsiderable achievements were placed under scrutiny, he was relegated to the benign role of just another successful snob in a tribe of many. This suited Shisui just fine.

He had only been home appreciably for about forty-five minutes when someone else came along to make him feel unwelcome.

Shisui fully admitted to possessing tunnel vision when it came to people. He hadn't spared Sasuke a single thought since leaving; his mental image of him was capped at ten years of age, and consequently he had to be reintroduced to the high school senior who slouched into the living room swinging a canvas messenger bag in artful nonchalance. Sasuke's hair was the same bird nest, but Shisui could objectively admit that he had grown up well: decently smart, athletic, hot in that showy, part-time-modeling way, with attitude to match. He possessed the general family assets—alabaster skin, crow-feather hair, luminous grey eyes—but few of the graceful fluencies that had made his brother fascinating to watch.

"Is that how you dress these days?" Sasuke said, after they had stared at each other in silence over the coffee table for a full minute.

Shisui glanced down at himself—his gunmetal button-down and slim dark slacks, a Hugo Boss ensemble so _de rigueur_ it was positively chic, but evidently Sasuke had other ideas. He shrugged and said, "The day you can rock business casual is the day you earn your manhood, little cousin."

Sasuke looked at him loathingly. At that age, everyone hated being spoken down to.

"You work in advertising?" Another laconic, unenthusiastic overture.

"That's right. Who told you?"

"No one. I read about you in _Seventeen Japan_."

Shisui winced, but only inwardly. "Yeah, I led their rebranding project last year." He must have been drunk when he had agreed to that interview.

Sasuke crossed his long legs, one over the other, and said, "Done any interesting work lately?"

"Have you seen the new JAL campaign? That was me."

"So it was your idea to broadcast to the world that every pretty girl in Japan either wants to become an idol singer or flight attendant?"

Shisui raised one of his eyebrows. "Because that's an inaccurate image?"

Sasuke actually laughed. Not the sarcastic chuckle but a full-on ha-ha affair. His shoulders shook and his spiky hair jostled around, which Shisui kind of liked, watching the light catch Sasuke's silver earring at just the right angle. He was stunned by this development, and would have remained so had Mikoto not walked into the room looking distressed.

"Shisui-kun, we haven't talked about where you'll be staying for the night."

The house was bursting at the seams, obscure members of the extended family crawling out of the woodwork for the impending pie-division, the imminent bloody dismembering of the corpulent beast. Shisui wondered if even half this many people had shown up for the funeral, and okay, it was totally his fault he had decided to come at the last minute but that didn't change the fact that he was shit out of luck.

"It's not a problem, Mikoto-san. I'll just check into a hotel or something."

"Oh no, that won't be necessary," said Mikoto, her face lighting up. "There's still the carriage house."

He would have really preferred the hotel.

-x-

The story behind the carriage house went like this:

When he entered high school, Shisui finally gave in to the longing glances of his female classmates and went out with one. Miho had been in his class in junior high, made him an absolutely bitching banner for the intramural soccer tournament, and most importantly, brought him a handmade bento with fan-shaped soy sauce containers every other day. As Itachi could attest, Shisui's affection could _totally_ be bought with food.

There were select details he loved about her and would always remember, the way she blushed so thoroughly it inflamed the part in her hair, her emphatically un-orphaned background full of wild, enthralling stories about nagging parents and embarrassing siblings that she was never shy to tell him about, always with a teasingly fed-up sigh. Her endearing lack of complications was unquestionably her most attractive trait.

But the problem was that the relationship just never went anywhere, and even for a high school romance it was quickly becoming clear that they just weren't right. At the start of summer vacation, they lost their virginities in a session of truly uninspired sex, and that just seemed to make everything worse. So it came to be that he went to her house one day when Miho was out, and instead was greeted by her older brother, home from university.

Hiroto told Shisui he was a practicing nihilist. He was asthmatic, studied fractals in Kyoto, and had a kind of chilling, unbalanced quality that Shisui would correctly place as _edginess_. But with edginess came the edge, over which you might stumble and plummet. At the time it made no difference. Limerence had him by the throat, and held fast. Never mind that Hiroto was twenty-three to his fifteen, an inestimable mathematical mind cannibalized by his second nervous breakdown in three years—or perhaps that was the attraction. There was something deeply alluring about his sad struggle: a lovely, hopeless pratfall.

He remembered ducking his head in laughter over a clever Nietzschean jibe one afternoon, and looking up into a kiss. They'd been drinking warm Suntory beer and smoking marijuana—sticky, sweet, like wasted youth. Like Shisui _himself_ would say, years later and many more ill-advised fucks under his belt: liquor in the front, poker in the rear.

Joking aside, he probably wouldn't have preferred it so literally that first time, but after the long sloppy kisses and fumbling gropes it became apparent that Hiroto's experience in this regard was of the theoretical variety. But there was a manic gleam in his eyes that passed for confidence; it simultaneously turned Shisui on and made him feel naked, exposed, watching Hiroto trying to uncap a lube bottle with one hand and shoving a pillow under Shisui's hips with the other. Felt the smooth, uncalloused palms firm on the inside of his thighs, pressing them apart in the space of a few shuddering breaths, and then—_fuck_. Fucking hell, how was this going to _work?_ A sharp, slippery twist and he felt something wide and hot and hard, stretching him open and just kept going on and on, and shit, was this guy going to go all in _one_ thrust?

His eyes were watering and he almost went limp, but he dug his heels into Hiroto's back and urged him on anyway. Bit his lip and forced himself to relax and exhale, and—oh. Oh well, that wasn't—it wasn't good, but it was… better. Even more fascinating was the way Hiroto's eyes flared in surprise, his mouth dropping open in a gasp when he finally, _finally_ glided home. He managed three more shallow thrusts before spasming in climax, going abruptly still. As Shisui lay there, sore and feverish, wondering when it would be appropriate to reach down and finish himself off, a devastated expression clouded Hiroto's face, the reality of their situation suddenly sinking in. "Don't tell," he sobbed, his face burned red buried in Shisui's neck. "Please don't tell." And Shisui, touched, but not in love, stroked his back encouragingly and agreed.

-x-

Of course he couldn't keep it from Itachi, his only confidant back in those days. In perfect confidence Shisui had requested discretion, which Itachi had apparently interpreted as, "Yes, please call up my girlfriend and tell her about my fling with her closeted cradle-robbing brother."

The results were predictably catastrophic. Shisui was lucky, he supposed, in that he at least had some insurance against social disaster. He was, in spite of everything, an honor student from a reputable family, not to mention the younger party by a good way, and even though he wished he had ended things with Miho before this so as to spare her the pain and humiliation, there wasn't very much he could do for her now except staying the hell out of her way. But he couldn't be relieved that he'd come out relatively unscathed because in the aftermath, Hiroto collapsed into horror and anguish. Undone and wretched, he took a bad turn with a pill bottle and spent the rest of the year in a Nagoya psych ward waiting for clarity. By the time he stepped out of the bin and back into the world, he wanted nothing more to do with Shisui, and who could blame him?

Shizuka to his great surprise had nothing to say on the subject. Nobody seemed to know what to say to him, actually, and he had the feeling eventually everything would just fall into a kind of limbo, and maybe that was alright. He wasn't turning back anyhow.

The one time Itachi tried to initiate a conversation, Shisui said, "Save it," and slammed the door in his face.

He was sleeping in the garret at this time, because it would be impossible to avoid talking when you were living in each other's back pockets. But he couldn't stay there forever, and he didn't want to inconvenience the family by moving into another room.

The sad part was: he wasn't even in shock.

One year ago, when Shisui was in his last year of junior high, two of his teachers were discovered having an adulterous affair. Both were married, happily so, and in fact their "illicit" relationship was a long standing open secret, somewhat astounding in its durability given their provincial home. They went on trips together as a couple, and everybody knew the truth, including the adult son of the man. Everybody that was, except for the spouses. It wasn't particularly dirty laundry, just old and worn from the tiring business of living.

One divorce, one trial separation, and several shattered lives later, the entire student body turned on the one who had told, and Shisui bore witness to this unthinking martyrdom with a remote, ossified kind of horror, like watching a car wreck in slow motion, in itself a great metaphor for the graceless mechanism of love.

"They had a right to know," Itachi told him simply, fishing another hate letter out of his shoe locker. He frowned, and said, "It was the right thing to do."

"Sure," Shisui said. "But it ain't no _good_ thing to do."

He knew even as the words were coming out of his mouth that such a distinction would be lost on Itachi. There was nothing he could do to convey the truth of this simple good. That teachers were just as fallible and fucked-up as anyone else. That the woman's small children didn't need to see their daddy tearing up the wedding photos. That it was possible, if rare and painful, to make peace with having two kinds of love—the public love, and the deep, smoldering one that you kept to yourself. Neither reason nor platitude could sway Itachi. He was no narc, took no smug pleasure in moral superiority; it was simply that he liked to have the facts straight. With him, with this mind full of ideas and good will, you got away with exactly nothing.

Contrary to the assertion of his acquaintances, Shisui wasn't some kind of prodigy: he was merely exceptionally good at everything he did. Genius seemed to indicate some special innate quality, a magical stream of excellence that normal people couldn't tap into. That wasn't how he operated. He didn't pull rabbits out of hats—there was nothing about his accomplishments that was superhuman in any way. He didn't see the world in conceptual planes others couldn't but give him a concrete problem, a challenge to get from A to B, and he would figure out a way. The closest thing to a genius quality in him was his obsession with beating the system.

People insisted on attributing this distinction to him anyway because most of them had a poor understanding of what genius truly entailed. They believed geniuses were the pinnacles of human existence, when reality was much closer to the opposite. Shisui had rubbed shoulders with enough bona fide geniuses in his lifetime—his brainiac colleagues from the old agency, Mensa-caliber minds who worked for his clients and even in Hydra's tech division—to know that they were the least likely to flourish in society. These guys were not people-people. Insensitive to and annoyed by the subtle nuances of interpersonal interactions, most of them were unkempt and erratic and physically unattractive, by nature or lack of effort. Ugly, without the Great Personality to make up for it. Their vision was so immense everybody inevitably let them down.

And Itachi, he knew, was a member of that doomed clan. His only saving grace was his genetics, which had plastered up all the uncomely telltale signs, but on the inside he was exactly the same as all his smelly, abrasive cohorts. His mind could conjure up endless dimensions in every possible permutation, but the real world eluded him; he didn't understand what it wanted from him, or why what he gave was just never enough.

At this time, their driver had just gotten married and the suite of rooms above the garage was unoccupied. It was strictly utilitarian in structure, one bedroom and an attached water closet, and other than a bed frame had no furniture to speak of. Shisui and his friends spent an entire weekend moving his stuff in, sweeping and dusting and decorating with military-like zeal, and afterward he threw a party and had more fun than he'd ever known since moving into this house.

But now the guests were gone and he was lying awake in the early morning, listening to his uncle's car starting in the garage below. Watching the light bleeding blue and grey into the room, he just felt hollow and deflated. He had been betrayed and acted out of anger, but now the door to Itachi's room was no longer the door to his, and it didn't seem worth it at all.

**. . .**

**TBC**


	3. Chapter 3

**Almost Was Good Enough**

**. . .**

**Part III**

**. . .**

_You have infiltrated and overtaken me  
>even in your absence till<br>you've turned me into a language  
>I cannot speak without you.<em>

—Zen Oleary

**. . .**

All in all, about half a year went by. It was the end of February, that slim month of strange, sentimental whims. Shisui's desk piled high with boxes of chocolate left over from Valentine's that he kept forgetting to toss out—against all reason his haul this year was bigger than ever, proving that abject scandal just made a person more desirable. The day was utterly disgusting, chilly and vaporous, a miserable rain dragging itself listlessly across the land, the sky bruised and spiteful. Shisui wrapped his scarf more tightly around his face, taking the stairs two at a time, looking forward to nothing more than crawling out of his damp clothes and into a thick blanket.

He found all the lights switched on in his room, and Itachi sitting on the edge of his bed.

Shisui stopped in the middle of the doorway, scowling. "We don't share a room anymore, y'know?" he said. "Maybe next time ya could try knockin'?"

Itachi remained silent, sitting there like a plum with who knew what condemning thoughts whirling around in his head. Shisui felt like plunging a hand into his hair, frustrated beyond words.

"Grandmother doesn't leave the house much these days," Itachi said, apropos of nothing.

"Hag's gettin' old. Yer point?"

"So you're much more at liberty to do as you wish, living up here."

Shisui blinked in confusion, then followed Itachi's gaze and found him looking at the wastebasket, its bottom lined with condom wrappers. A sudden heat flushed to his face.

In a savage motion, he ripped off his jacket and threw it on the floor. "Ya know what, I'm so sick of this shit," he snapped. "Ya want to bust on somebody, find yerself a girlfriend to bust on."

Itachi's shoulders jumped a little, like he'd been tasered. He dropped his eyes to the floor, and Shisui bit his bottom lip. Sometimes it just floored him that no matter how he was provoked, it still made him feel like total shit to put that expression on Itachi's face. He wheeled away into another corner of the room just to place as much temporary distance between them as possible.

"Ya don't hafta to do this," Shisui said to the wall. "I get it a'ready."

"But you have to understand _why_ I did it."

"Because it was the right thing to do, I gotcha, a'right?" He didn't know how much more of this he could take, and if Itachi started telling him it wasn't like that and produced a flowchart to delineate the utter rationality in the logic of his actions, some degree of manslaughter would go down. "I shoulda known ya wouldn't make an exception just 'cos it was me."

"No," Itachi said, going a little off-kilter. "It _wasn't_ the right thing to do. It was wrong. And I knew it was wrong, but I wanted to do it anyway. And you _are_ an exception."

It hit like a bullet to the spine. Shisui caught his breath, and forced himself to turn around. He stared at the knobs of Itachi's knuckles, pressed tightly into the bed sheet, and saw for the first time that his best loved friend was shrouded in a loneliness darker than his eyes, quieter than his voice, of such salience an astronaut could have seen it from space.

"Itachi…" he said, strangled. "You…"

Itachi's head dipped even further, bangs falling to shield his eyes. "Does it gross you out?"

His voice sounded on the edge of breaking. Shisui felt a tender stirring inside him, his heart suddenly too heavy for one. In two strides he crossed the room and knelt down beside the bed, lifted Itachi's face, thumb brushing the ridge of his hairline, the sharp line of his jaw.

"No," he said. "No, it doesn't gross me out."

Time gelled and then skipped forward again, stumbling a little over the missed beat. Before he could say anything else, Itachi leaned forward and kissed him, a nervous diver going for that last beckoning pearl. He broke off almost as quickly, but Shisui pulled him back in, stroked his hair and tangled their bodies together, almost dragging them both onto the floor. He pressed his mouth to Itachi's and kept muttering, "See? It's okay. It's okay," and swallowed down every surge of panic that loomed up his throat each time he repeated the refrain.

Was it really okay? Fuck if he knew. Did that matter? Not in the least. If Itachi wanted it, it was as good as done.

And just like that, his heart was pounding, his pulse throbbing in his neck. He dragged himself up the side of the bed and sat next to Itachi, knee-to-knee, urging his head down to rest on his shoulder as they folded against each other. There was a long silence. On the windowpane, raindrops pattered a soft oblivious obbligato in accompaniment.

"Um. So. What do ya wanna do now?"

"I want to touch you."

Shisui deliberated for a moment, and then stopped, and made a decision. "Okay." He reached over his shoulders and pulled off his t-shirt, then got up, unbuttoned his jeans, and dropped them to the floor. His underwear followed, and then he was naked, taut, bared for whatever was coming next. "There. Touch whatever ya want."

They started with slow, tentative touches, then fell into deep explorative kisses. Itachi slid his hand down Shisui's back, pressed him closer in. His face did something complicated, and all of a sudden it was overwhelmingly clear that he was _fourteen_, which made the fact that Shisui was on the point of unzipping his uniform trousers some kind of terrible. At least he'd locked the door.

It wasn't as if they could _stop_, what with the way Itachi's white shirt was rucked up over his fair, smooth stomach, the dark fan of his lashes quivering over his flushed cheeks. Determined not to turn this into a disaster like _his_ first time (_both_ of them), Shisui rolled on top and helped Itachi throw one leg over his hip, showed him how to move so that they were in sync, rolling and riding against each other. A vapor filled up his head, terrifyingly vertiginous, and he almost couldn't breathe through the errant heat and the invisible intoxicants in the air.

But there was a single crystallized moment amidst the rocking motions when Itachi's face achieved such a beautiful, heartbreaking rictus under him that Shisui knew, with a final resigned ache, that it would matter fuck all how many lectures he gave himself about the dangers of mixing friendship with sex. That thrilling frisson running up his spine was the whorled beginnings of something powerful – grand and sweeping and utterly agonizing. In him had formed an unswerving internal compass, its polarity set at immovably at magnetic north. From the moment his gaze fell on this face, he would never lift it.

It was over in a matter of minutes, shaky and heated and needy. Itachi's breath hitched; he bucked and lifted his hips frantically into Shisui's thigh, and Shisui could feel him coming hard, feel the flex and release of his own cock a few seconds later. He eased their bodies into a more comfortable position, still intertwined on the twisted sheets, glowing with the flush that had sprung to their skin.

When they finally disentangled, the rain outside had escalated into a shower. Shisui fetched a box of tissues to clean them both up, and then they were back in their clothes, rumpled and awkward, scrubbing at dubious stains. He thought about grabbing a comb and redoing Itachi's hair as well, because if he walked out of here looking like that, they were as good as busted.

"Thank you," Itachi said abruptly, taking a half-hearted totter toward the door. "I—you didn't have to. I know this wasn't your idea, and it won't happen again. You can—"

Shisui stalked over and pulled Itachi back against him. Grabbed his face and kissed him firm, feeling angry and possessive—and maybe that was what this had always been about.

"Hey," he said tightly. "Hey. This ain't just a one-time thing. I wanted it too. Ya do _not_ get to feel ashamed about this, alright? Are ya in this with me or not?"

Itachi's breath exploded outward with relief as he returned the kiss, sealing the pact. The blissed-out glow on his skin still hadn't faded. Soon enough, they were out of their clothes again.

"We'll have to go soon," Itachi murmured against his shoulder, not sounding terribly pressed. "Dinner."

Shisui laughed softly. "That's plenty of time," he said, "plenty of time," and at the time it really did feel that way, it really did.

-x-

That day stayed with him. Through all those years where his life kept falling spectacularly together while everything in his head fell spectacularly apart. Days of an unknown dialect forcing itself on his voice and dusky-haired ghosts flashing by the corners of his eyes, nights spent sucking cocks and licking cunts and jerking off to the image of his erstwhile best friend the first time they had had sex. At times it even spilled over into the bedroom—consequently he had lost so many lovers, at least back when he'd still harbored delusions of committed relationship grandeur. He didn't do it the whole time, never called out the wrong name, yet somehow they were always able to tell. After awhile, he gave up on trying to make things last.

One memorable exception happened in his sophomore year, when he met and dated a non-traditional student five years his senior who had returned to university after an extended break. She called him out on it almost immediately, while they were sacked out on the floor of her messy apartment recovering from an epic fuck-a-thon.

"Don't lose your shit," Anko said, forestalling his kneejerk denial with an amused smile. "I was doing the same thing."

"Who were _you_ thinking of?" Shisui asked. He flopped over onto his stomach, suddenly curious.

"My old professor," she said, and laughed meanly when he pulled a face.

"I hope the 'old' part there is just figurative."

"He wasn't much for looks," Anko said. "But he had a very talented tongue."

"_Ew_."

"Ew is right," she said, somewhat sourly. "That man wasn't good for me—or for anyone, really. Some guys are plain assholes and I can deal with that, but this one, he just has a bad soul. I hate that it took me so long to realize it." She tilted her head at him, shifted her breasts against her arms. "Was it like that for you?"

"Nah," Shisui said. "Mine was practically a saint. Canonized by the Vatican."

"Then why?"

"You know," he said. "The typical stuff: family, society, irreconcilable personal differences."

Anko lifted her eyebrow skeptically. "And you let _that_ stop you? Why didn't you just ask her to run away with you or something?"

Shisui didn't feel like clarifying the whole 'it was a he not a she' thing, so he just said, "Tried it."

"And?"

"No go."

Anko clicked her tongue against her teeth. "Them's the break, huh?" She threw her bra at his head. "Hey, stop getting emo all over my duvet. You want a blowjob or something?" When she graduated and moved back to Beppu four months later, he was expectably devastated.

"I was gonna pop the question, you know," he told her in the airport bar, their farewell party of two. "Had a ring picked out and everything."

Anko snorted, swilling her glass lazily. "If I were the marrying type, you can put a soda tab on this finger."

"Now I think I'll save up to buy a speedboat instead."

"What is it with guys and _boats?_"

He laughed. "How can you not love something that goes from zero to sixty in less than 10 seconds? I like fast things—fast planes, fast boats, fast cars."

"Fast girls?"

"Not in particular."

"So I'm an exception?" Anko took another sip, curving a wry, fragmented smirk around the rim of her glass. "You know, I never gave a shit before but what's your type, anyway? That chick who broke your heart, what was she like?"

Turning away from her, Shisui stared out the massive glass window and saw another plane taking off in the distance, the lights on its wingtips brighter than the emerging stars. Explaining things in full seemed awfully complicated, so he said, simply, "I like the ascent."

-x-

Only that wasn't even close to the truth.

What he was into was far more like midair collision. The defining characteristic of a free spirit was a taste for disaster, for a life always one fatal misstep sway from falling apart. You were up for whatever—but in the event of an emergency, secure your own mask before assisting others.

At the time, the only thing he knew was that their relationship was undergoing a metamorphosis. First to go were the conversations. They used to talk endlessly, waged intense university-level debates on every subject under the sun. Now that time was a rare commodity, who could spare any for words? When you loved somebody, your flesh loved theirs: they would meet, fumble shyly a bit, and gradually let their bodies find each other, letting whatever information they needed to convey filter through the shared silence. Time together, however brief and meaningless, always left something under his skin.

On New Year's Eve, almost a year into the affair and nine since their stars first crossed each other's sky like two fragments chipped directly from the empyreal mosaic, Shisui snuck a bottle into his room and the two of them sat cross-legged on his bed in t-shirts and boxers toasting each other in silence, heartbeats almost audible in their chests. When midnight came Itachi leaned over and gave him a deep kiss, mouth burning and sweet with champagne, his mysterious hair finally loosened from its restraint and twined exquisitely in Shisui's fingers. They hoisted their glasses one last time, let the sparkling liquid spill onto the sheets over which they later made love.

He remembered lying awake afterward watching Itachi's sooty lashes fluttering shut to rest against his cheeks, glinting the barest hints of deep red under the soft lamp by the bed, a haunting contrast. Love a fog in his head, a drunken undertow. Never once imagining that someday, that feeling might find its dark twin.

But standing in his former abode now, facing the empty, frugal bed and the writing desk he had long ago liberated from his grandfather's study, Shisui was struck suddenly with anger. He went to the rust-flecked window, through which the east wing of the house was visible. He had stood at this very spot night after night staring out into the gathering dark, hoping to see a single window still lit. Now that he was here—and just like back then—Itachi was _everywhere_.

Why did he ever do it? Intimacy pained Itachi—that he knew. For this reason, he never encouraged his brother's clinginess, not that it helped any. What, then, had he hoped to get out of their relationship? Why had he let Shisui be the one first through his lips, his heart? What ludicrous romantic notions had he clung to, and, when they had failed him, immediately rejected? Because it was like that, and it _must_ have been like that—Itachi, the brilliant scientific mind, taking on love, the unproven theory. That it had managed to defeat him could be no more than a silly fluke. Once his hypothesis had proven false, it was time to throw it out and start over.

Shisui shook his head, trying to rid himself of the disturbing thought. Bitterness was getting the better of him; he was being unfair, unkind. Probably the truth was much simpler. Perhaps even as simple as that those early romances, incendiary and thrilling, eventually must all be extinguished. They were going at an unsustainable rate, like they just couldn't get enough, hell-bent on wrecking themselves on each other's body. Plowing headlong into the kamikaze terms of their roughshod love—a love they childishly perceived to be at once fated and half-baked, private and untouchable and tragic as the white teeth of winter that secretly loved the last red shreds of fall.

But a secret of that scale was like a needle in a cloth sack, and as fate would have it, the first person to suss them out was the one person who should not have been allowed to know.

-x-

He knew he couldn't hide from his relatives in the carriage house forever—so he left, and went to see Hinata. She was one of the last people he had talked to before leaving town, and possibly the only person in the village who might be willing to speak to him now.

The servant who greeted him performed a perfectly crisp lift of the eyebrow and ushered him into the sitting room, announcing in an even more flawlessly condescending tone that Young Miss will be down presently—proving once again what crazy mirror lands they lived in, despite the fact that the Hyuuga house was spacious and bright and filled with people who looked like ukiyo-e subjects, whereas the Uchiha mansion was gloomy and dark and inhabited by creatures plucked out of European gothic literature.

"Shisui-san," a voice said from the doorway.

Hinata had always been pretty, but the last time he'd seen her she had still been wishbone thin and slump-shouldered, sleek dark hair chopped bluntly around her neck. Now? Well, Young Miss indeed. She took two steps into the room, and Shisui leapt to his feet and swept her into a whirlwind hug, dragging her clean off the floor.

She yelped in surprise and returned the embrace, laughing helplessly into his shoulder as he brushed her long hair. Growing up did her a lot of good, he though, in a totally non-creepy way.

"Hey, you," he whispered. "Want to go see the windmill?"

"It's a little late in the day. How about a walk? I have so much to ask you."

They scattered fireflies along the dimly-lit path of the Hyuuga's enormous garden. Shisui listened, pleasant enough, as she quizzed him intelligently about his new life. When it was finally his turn to ask how she had been, Hinata instead replied with, "Neji-niisan went to Tokyo too."

Shisui glanced at her sidelong. "Did he?" he said carefully. "What for?"

"University. He applied to Keio." She paused for a significant moment, and before Shisui could give his congratulations, said, "I don't think he's coming back."

"I see."

"And Mother came home." Two pieces of contradictory news, delivered with the same troubled expression. Shisui couldn't help marveling at that, until he remembered there was nothing particularly marvelous about having to see someone you loved every single day but be unable to look them straight in the face, for fear of seeing once-familiar eyes now glazed with depression and the medications used to suppress it. Awful as it sounded, psychiatric facilities existed for a reason: to ration down that experience, portion it into high-concentrate easy-digestible bites.

"Shisui-san," Hinata said, after an awkward pause. "Have you ever thought about settling down?"

"Settling down? You mean getting married? Spawning?"

"Well… yes," she said, slightly flustered.

Shisui slowed his steps to a more deliberate pace. This was a personal current he didn't tap into a rule, but like a lot of his other personal rules, it didn't apply to her. "Hinata," he began earnestly. "Do you know that feeling, that wonderful, magical feeling people get when the whole world goes quiet and they look into the eyes of the one person they just know in their heart of heart that they're going to spend the rest of their life with?"

"Yes?" she said, hopeful.

"That's how I feel about a Koenigsegg commercial."

Hinata looked horrorstruck. "You don't mean that."

"No, it's true," Shisui said, laughing. "It's who I am. To question my absolutes is to question the meaning of my existence." He forced his face to hold together a serious expression long enough to say, "Tell me the truth, Hinata, how many perfectly happy, stable marriages do you know?"

"Perfect is a lot to aim for," Hinata said mildly.

"Not for me."

Hinata just gazed at him with big, sad, how-can-I-save-you-from-yourself eyes. Shisui bit back a laugh. "Oh, you think I'm a terrible person now."

"No," she said, to his surprise. "Actually—actually I think it's great."

Shisui nodded sagely. "And I think it would be great if you joined me for dinner. Well, by 'great' I mean 'morbid and uncomfortable' since it's a family reunion dinner that pertains to a recent death, but that's ever more reason why I need you there."

"I can't impose on your family like that," Hinata said.

"I hate my family," Shisui said blithely. "You can tell by how I ran away for seven years. Come on, nearly the entire tribe is there, there's got to be enough food to feed a minor colony. And besides," he pretended to flick her nose, "you eat like a bird."

"Some other time," she said with an easy smile on her face. "But I will walk you back."

Shisui smiled to himself, taking her arm into his. This was how they had been then, and now, it was how they were. For the first time since his arrival, he was starting to feel human again.

By the time they neared the mansion, the conversation had turned to the trials and tribulations Hinata faced as a high school student, the worst of which Shisui felt had to be enduring Sasuke as a classmate. He had his head tossed back in laughter, and thus didn't see the person striding toward them until it was too late to do something like, say, scampering in the opposite direction.

Then he heard Hinata squeak, "Good evening, Itachi-san," and thought, _oh, shit_.

And it was indeed Itachi who walked silently into the bright spill of streetlight. He looked—like he had looked in high school, clad in a white cotton oxford and tragically boring pants, and only incidentally like the spitting fucking image of Shisui's default erotic fantasy. Even in this chalky lighting, his stupid hair looked glossy and rich and bold and goddamn it, _longer than ever_. The exposed hollow under his neck was eminently lickable.

At this point, Shisui might have made a spirited run for it anyway if Hinata hadn't edged herself delicately in between them, nervous but determined. "I-I've been meaning to speak to you," she said, clearly improvising. "Would you mind terribly going over my last calcu—_English_ exam with me? T-there were some parts that I didn't quite understand."

Itachi's unreadable eyes were still laser-guided on Shisui, but when he answered Hinata's question, it was with perfect equanimity: "I would be happy to, Hinata-san."

"Itachi-san has taken over as my tutor since you, uh, l-left," Hinata explained.

"Oh, is that right?" Shisui said, and laughed unnaturally. They were the worst comedy duo in stand-up history. He was far too rich and successful to be this verbally incontinent. If anyone at Hydra saw him now, he would have to suicide-bomb the office.

"It was very rough," Hinata said, vaguely distressed by his subpar acting skill. "My test scores dropped so horribly after you, um, l-left."

"Through my fault, through my most grievous fault," Shisui said with cringing cheer, and then made a sharp, obvious turn for the gate. "Well, you kids have fun now! I'm going to go wash up for dinner. I'll see you later, Hinata-chan."

Irony. All those years ago he had allowed Hinata to hide behind him only so that years later, he could hide behind her.

-x-

The thing was Shisui had left for a very good reason.

At Todai, he had declared History as his major for a lark, and one of his senior seminars had been something called _Strat, Tech, and War_. He'd followed the brilliant antics of famed dictators through the ages, and learned over and over again that a favored strategy was divide and conquer. If he had known this when he had been seventeen, he would have understood why his grandmother had chosen to separate he and Itachi when the time had come to put the fear of God into them. Shizuka was nothing if not all about conquest and rule, the vulgar taste of submission.

"In my own house," she said, every intonation spiking with subterranean rage. "Never in my wildest dreams would have I imagined that something like this could happen in _my own house_."

She was playing the martyr to the hilt. Shisui had to marvel at the consistency of her dramatics, how anyone managed to grow up into sane functional human beings with her as a defining force in their life. He had a sinking feeling they didn't—they just faked it well enough for a couple of decades before succumbing to the murderous meltdown. If anybody ever wondered about the genesis of his hard-drinking, commitment-shunning workaholism—well, wonder no more.

"Yeah, yer one to talk," he said, going for a low blow. "Ya _married_ yer cousin."

Shizuka flayed him with a look. "You think this is a laughing matter?"

"No," Shisui snapped, sick of diplomacy. "No, I don't think it's funny at all." He was feeling this conversation like it had been in the work since the day they had met. "What didcha say to Itachi?"

Shizuka just laughed at him, sharp enough to cut glass. He slammed his fist on the ground and bellowed, loud enough to blow their secret to the rest of the household: _"What did ya say to him?"_

"That I'm sending one of you away," she said finally.

"Big surprise," Shisui said, assuming the obvious. "But I'm gonna leave for college in a couple of months anyway so what's the point kickin' me out now?"

"Not you. Him."

"_What?_"

"You're going to stay," his grandmother said. "I'm sending _him_ away."

"That's what ya told Itachi?" Shisui said, shocked.

"That's right," Shizuka said sternly. "He goes. You stay."

"But why?" Shisui demanded. "Ya _hate_ me. Ya hated me since before we even met. I never listen to ya and I fight ya at every turn. Why do ya want me to stay here so badly?"

"Because you're Kiyoko's son," said his grandmother. "You're not allowed to leave me."

Shisui shook, seeing scarlet fire rush into his field of vision. "Just when are ya gonna to stop punishing me for being born?" He got to his feet, anger churning in his dry throat. "Stop treatin' us like yer playthings. Either we both stay, or we _both_ gonna leave."

It didn't rile her one bit. "And what will you do then?" Shizuka said, smiling thinly. "After you cut ties with your family and waltz out there into the big world, just the two of you against everyone else. Following in the proud footsteps of your mother. Is that what you have in mind?"

"That's exactly what I have in mind," Shisui said, saw on steel. He was fearless and terrible, like heaven bearing down upon humanity; he was larger than life. "Yer can't stop us."

"But I think somebody might have something to say about that," Shizuka said, victorious, and gestured at a point somewhere behind him.

Shisui wheeled around, and saw Itachi leaning against the shoji door that he hadn't even heard opening. He was breathing harshly, shoulders narrowing and moving with his chest, face drained of blood, as if fearful that being in the same room with the double helix of spite and dysfunction that was Shisui and Shizuka would transform him into a toad. Immediately Shisui made to reach for him, take his wrist in his hand, but Itachi jerked back and snatched away from his touch.

"No, Shisui." He shook his head firmly, his hair loosening with the motion, coming apart. "No."

The ground went out from under him. Years later, even after time and excessive grain liquor had blunted this memory that had once cut like a knife, he would still remember, be able to access like jukebox music the stinging ache sinking deep into the roots of his teeth.

Itachi's eyes were looking everywhere but at him. "I can't," he pleaded, miserable. "I'm sorry."

So there you had it. Shisui had left for a very good reason, and every time he needed a reminder of it, all he had to do was shove aside that rainy day and replace it with the sound of those seven words and the feeling they had inspired: shattering ice, snapping ropes, and cold, cold water.

-x-

Dinner was a hideous affair. The dining room that had always felt huge and absurdly over-proportioned was suddenly packed to the gills, sardined with uptight, unnaturally attractive people. The old fart to his right kept pontificating about the many and varied failures of the Liberal Democratic Party, and Shisui couldn't even feign polite interest, not with Itachi at the other end of the table shooting mystifying glances in his direction at increasingly short intervals.

To his vast relief he managed to strike up a promising conversation with his second cousin Obito, a fellow renegade who had had the audacity to pursue the disgraceful rebellious career path of—wait for it—_social work_. But then Obito started waxing poetic about his cardiologist fiancée, and Shisui had to leave, because healthy committed couples made him homicidal.

"Well," he muttered, fleeing the room, "this has been sufficiently painful and awkward." The last time he'd had an experience this punishingly awful at least he had gotten a fuck out of it.

Five minutes later he was creeping under the old willow tree in the garden bumming a smoke and hissing death threats into his phone at Sugimoto, who was predictably already disaster-bound. It was admittedly petty, because even though Sugimoto was truly a moron who got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn't looking, this tirade of verbal abuse wasn't entirely well-directed.

This lasted for approximately another five minutes. He heard footsteps, and knew that, finally, here it was. He couldn't run anymore.

"You didn't eat very much at dinner," Itachi said, joining him under the tree.

"God, after all these years, you're still monitoring my caloric intake?" Shisui said good-naturedly, and hung up his phone, cutting Sugimoto off in the middle of another feeble, fallacious excuse. "It's not a body image thing, I promise. Let's just say that congregations of self-satisfied asshats make me lose my appetite."

"Forbearance was never one of your greatest strengths," Itachi said, leaning against the tree trunk so they were standing side by side. There was a flinty quality to his eyes. It plunged into Shisui's chest, but he forced himself not to get fidgety.

"So," Shisui began. "Gunning for your first doctorate, huh? What the heck is Environmental Engineering anyway?"

Itachi lifted his shoulder, recognizing a factitious question when he heard one. "I read an article about you," he returned, and clarified, "In a magazine." It was a strange conversation gambit, awkward but heartfelt.

Shisui snorted. "Did Sasuke show it to you?" he asked, because there was no way, _no way_ that Itachi read _Seventeen_ of his own volition. "So. What do you think?"

"You are," Itachi said, with an air of clinical critique, "very different."

Shisui cocked an eyebrow in challenge. Well, he wouldn't outright _lie_ and say that a part of him hadn't perversely anticipated this. That he hadn't examined and reexamined his reflection scrupulously in the mirror before departure, hadn't planned on preening at least a little bit upon arrival. _Hello, my shameful past, how'd you like me now?_

"Is that 'different-good' or 'different-in-a-medically-concerning-way'?"

"Different-good," Itachi conceded, but then was a jerkwad and added, "For the most part. You changed your dialect."

Shisui couldn't help stumbling, just a little. "It's what us modern boys do when we enter the corporate world," he said feelingly. "We don't have the luxury of quirky individuality like you dinosaurs in academia."

"It can't be easy," Itachi condescended, slow and arch. "It's just that, when I think about you, 'conformist' is not a word that comes to mind."

Shisui almost blurted out, "Do you think about me a lot?" and had to bite his lip to stop himself.

He moved out from under the willow's shadow. It had been years since he'd lived somewhere free of light pollution; overhead, the stars were like salt crystals strewn across the evening sky, like heaven was trying to sieve itself through, disperse like fine powder over the earth.

"Am I bothering you?" Itachi asked, voice no louder than the rustling of the leaves above him.

"I don't really know what that means anymore, Itachi," Shisui admitted, looking away.

Those things that lay between them all these years, they were more or less victimless crimes. The gut-wrenching pain was gone and even the lingering echoes were growing fainter by the day. What remained constant was this invisible kite string that connected them. It didn't have to be so anguishing, if he didn't allow it to be. Every self-help manual would teach you that it was pointless to hold on to things that couldn't be changed—could never _have_ been changed.

Shisui made an expansive gesture. "I'm a big girl, it's a big world." He smiled deprecatingly. "I'll get over it. Anyway, I think I'll make a detour to the altar room before turning in. Haven't paid my respect. It makes me feel like I might get struck by lightning any moment now."

Itachi failed to stop him.

The Uchiha family chapel was, for lack of a better description, kind of a work of art. There were antiques in there that would fetch millions on the market; if it were open to the public people would want to come and take pictures of it and use it as background in movies about traditional families with dark, dangerous secrets. Reigning over the elaborate lacquered altar was a large portrait of a handsome old man, silver-haired and kind of face: the grandfather Shisui had never met and whose heart his mother had irrevocably broken in her flight for freedom.

And next to him: Shizuka, severe and imperious.

"Well, old bitch," Shisui said, facing her memorial tablet. "Here I am. It looks like you couldn't hold out after all." He lowered his head, placed his hands into his pockets. "I'm sorry."

**. . .**

**TBC**


End file.
